AISB 2019

I’m spending the week at the Society for Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) 2019 conference. Will be tweeting as I go on @davidburden with tag @aisb2019 and will post a summary at the end. Keynote from Kathleen Richardson on Sex Robots was great, and behind the attention grabbing title were some interesting thoughts around anthropological theories applied to our relationship to robots and virtual humans, notably egocentric “I” theories, networked “We” theories, theories of attachment, power dynamics, prostitution and slavery. We touch on the notion of virtual humans and a new form of slavery in the book and it’s a topic which would be interesting to explore further.

TechUK AI Ethics Conference

Just before Christmas I attended the TechUK Ethics & AI conference in London. It was an excellent event with great speakers and an knowledgeable and interesting bunch of delegates. "AI" was being interpreted more as machine learning than conversational AI/virtual humans, but here are a few of the key take-aways:

1) Kate Coughlan of the BBC presented some research they'd done on public attitudes towards AI - showing which areas excited people, and which they were wary of. Overall them seemed more wary than excited. Interestingly the notion of digital immortality came out as one of the few positives!

2) Ethics (AI and other tech) should be about making sure that people are “safe” even if they don’t care or have the time

3) The Royal Society and  Ipsos Mori also doing interesting public attitudes research. The Royal Society found that "only 9% of those surveyed had heard the term ‘machine learning’" - hence the AI catch-all! The Royal Society has also issues an AI Narratives report.

5) The RS presentation included an image from Boyle's notes (see image at top) which showed "extending life" as one of his top priorities - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7798012/Robert-Boyles-prophetic-scientific-predictions-from-the-17th-century-go-on-display-at-the-Royal-Society.html

6) Luciano Floridi (https://twitter.com/Floridi) was the keynote. He has a useful 5 factor AI Ethics model which is based on a bio-ethics one.:

• Beneficence (do only good): Promoting Well-Being, Preserving Dignity, and Sustaining the Planet
• Non-maleficence (do no harm): Privacy, Security and “Capability Caution”
• Autonomy (of the human, not the AI): The Power to Decide (Whether to Decide)
• Justice: Promoting Prosperity and Preserving Solidarity (and eliminating discrimination)
• Explicability: Enabling the Other Principles Through Intelligibility and Accountability

All in all a great day, and certainly going along next year.